


signs & signifiers

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-17
Updated: 2005-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:24:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was the endall revelation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	signs & signifiers

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: S7  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Mulder didn't like these hick town assignments anymore, all small-minded people who were crazy instead of thoughtful. He went for a run along a road lined with mangy flowers. He loped along the graveled shoulder until his knees reminded him he wasn't so young anymore and he had to stop, bent over to catch his breath. He nearly put his face in a big flower and had to blow it away from his sweaty face. Queen Anne's Lace, he recognized. Always Sam's favourite, because of the tender story his mother told about them. The fairies knit them out of lace, she had said to an infant Sam, all brown curls and big eyes, and the red blossom in the middle is where the fairy sits when she's done. Scully's face reminded him of the flower: pale and fine and her lips budding the colour of autumn.

A car went past in the dimming evening and Mulder flinched from the lights. He remembered the moment he'd realized Scully was in love with him: loyal Scully who had followed him to the ends of the earth and through the dark maze of his mind. The touch of her consciousness in his catatonic brain had been like the dawn he'd thought would never come. She had come to him fierce from the battle with the strange doctors and Diana, alight with fury and concern and an immense tenderness that staggered him. His overclocked brain took too long to process it as she bent over him with her gentle hands and her sunburned face. Love.

It was the supernova of his life, the endall revelation.

Mulder was flattened by Scully's composure. How long had she been loving him this way? She handled him the way she handled her gun: her small cool hands took him apart and put him back together with her accustomed precision. Even the tender touches, when she brushed his hair from his forehead or squeezed his hand briefly in the car, even then she maintained an air of clinical indifference. She wore her doctor face to excuse her distance, she went to a Buddhist shrine to demonstrate her detachment.

And inside her all this time the unbounded universe of her love. The gravity of her curved him to her position in space-time, the essential point of her. Scully was his grand unifying theory. She held him together. Sometimes she held him in her impartial embrace and he felt on the verge of telling her again that he loved her. He wanted to tell her every time he opened his clumsy mouth. His words were not refined enough and the crucible of his heart did nothing to reforge them into something fine and right for her.

He wondered if it had been a hallucination, the catatonic vision of her love.

He straightened wearily, goaded his feet into action, and twisted his ankle neatly on a patch of gravel. "Shit," he said under his breath, though no one was around. He prodded the spur of his ankle bone with his fingers as if it would tell him something, but his body refused to reveal its mysteries except to Scully's hands. Headlights flashed behind him, limning his skin with light, and the car crunched to a halt behind him. He turned, perplexed, to see Scully's quiet face floating above the steering wheel.

"You'd been gone a while." She leaned out the window to look at him. "Thought you might need a ride."

"Thanks." He limped to the passenger's side and ran the chair back on its runners so that he could almost stretch his legs.

"Did you hurt yourself, Mulder?" She surveyed the road with a practiced eye and put the car in drive.

"Bit," he said. He wanted to curl up in the profound hollow of her collarbone. He wanted to trace the parallel creases of her slender neck. Instead he fiddled with the radio, and she said nothing.

At the hotel she parked neatly between the lines of the slot outside their rooms. "Come on," she said, locking the car. "I'll check you out."

"I'm all sweaty." He stood bashful in front of her, knowing his grey t-shirt was damp in patches and his shorts were thin and clingy.

"Like I give a damn, Mulder." She motioned and he followed her meekly and flopped down on the cheap nylon garden of her bed. She untied his sneaker gently and peeled off his sock, a little grey around the edges, he saw. He'd never figured out bleach. He let his head hang off the opposite edge of her bed, his arms spread-eagled as she pressed here and there on his ankle. He stared at the ghostly drape of tomorrow's suit with her shoes jumbled under it. Scully was all hospital corners and tidy containers except for her habit of shedding her shoes and leaving them anywhere. He didn't blame her. Just looking at the pillars of the clunky heels made his arches ache. He tried not to flinch when she put the pads of her fingertips against a sore spot.

"Just twisted it," she pronounced finally, after what seemed like an eternity of exploration, though his expanded sense of time could have been due to his inversion. "You should be fine in the morning. Take some ibuprofen, though."

"Thanks," he said, and rolled over onto his stomach. She squeezed his ankle briefly as if she were distracted and released him.

"Go shower," she said. "I think there's a bad movie on later, if you want to watch it after we go over the case."

"Absolutely," he said, overeager and trying to sound cool. "Nothing I love more than an awful movie edited to run in a tv time slot."

She flashed him an abbreviated smile, and he touched her shoulder on his way out, because he could not tell her he loved her.


End file.
